Footballer, rich man, celebrity, consumer: Media blindness and the denial of domestic abuse in the Stephanie Ward and Danny Simpson case

Mainstream media sense-making around domestic abuse perpetrated by soccer players within the English Premier League has not been examined to any significant degree by criminologists. Within this article, we describe our study of national news media reporting on the Stephanie Ward and Danny Simpson c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inCrime, media, culture Vol. 15; no. 3; pp. 479 - 501
Main Authors Yardley, Elizabeth, Kennedy, Morag, Brolan, Liam
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London, England SAGE Publications 01.12.2019
Sage Publications Ltd
Subjects
Abusers
Athletes
Blindness
Celebrities
Consumerism
Criminologists
Criminology
Denial
Domestic violence
Football
Identity
Media coverage
Misogyny
News media
Professional soccer
Women
United Kingdom > UK
domestic abuse
soccer
sports
news media
media blindness
Denial
football
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Summary:Mainstream media sense-making around domestic abuse perpetrated by soccer players within the English Premier League has not been examined to any significant degree by criminologists. Within this article, we describe our study of national news media reporting on the Stephanie Ward and Danny Simpson case. We discovered that media representations were blind to the domestic abuse perpetrated by Simpson, denying him the identity of the ‘abuser’ and presenting Ward as the aggressor. All of this played out against a structural backdrop of consumerism, which reinforces misogynistic expectations of who women in football circles are and how they should behave.
ISSN:1741-6590
1741-6604
DOI:10.1177/1741659018797987